I think cracking down on wage theft should be a very tractable problem.
Wage theft is extremely common in some industries but virtually nonexistent in others. When I worked for "tech companies" it was as a salaried employee and the amount of overtime I did was obscene. Technically not wage theft since I wasn't hourly, but when you start doing 60+ hours a week for a job which is ostensibly 40 hours a week, because management sucks at their own jobs no less, I think it becomes de facto wage theft. And in jobs which actually do hourly, overt wage theft is
extremely common in some industries like food service, but there are also industries, or at least companies, in which it is virtually nonexistent. Working as a tech for a manufacturing company, I clock in on the minute, clock out on the minute, never work even a single second without being on the clock, have never been asked to, and have never not been paid for my time on the clock. This is the way it always should be.
I think we need to abolish salaried work, at least for anybody who isn't in management, and legally require companies to use timeclocks with auditable logs. And if a manager tells you to work without clocking in, that should be a mandatory prison sentence. Do all this and wage theft should become a relic of the past.
(Also, none of this requires it to become a lengthy bureaucratic nightmare to hire or lay off employees, so the concern about companies becoming less nimble and more reluctant to hire at all should not apply. It is possible to have our cake and eat it too.)